Following the trends of mass customization, globalization and environmental protection new customer and legal requirements need to be fulfilled in the vehicle product development. The drivers named above often result in a more and more complex product portfolio regarding the variance of components and mounting positions. Hereby passenger cars and commercial vehicles are most affected, offering individualization in large quantity. As a result, the Vehicle Concept Development Process(VCDP) is getting inscrutable and inefficient, since common methods are unable to manage the variety of requirements and therefore components in a useful way. This paper aims to introduce a new approach for the Vehicle Architecture Designphase of passenger cars and commercial vehicles. The current package process can be divided in three phases. Within the phase of the Vehicle Dimension Design (VDD), exterior dimensions and passengers’ positions are defined. During the Vehicle Architecture Design (VAD), the drivetrain-and vehicle architecture is developed. Followed by the Vehicle Package Design (VPD) all components, including hoses and wires, are integrated in the vehicle. In a first step the proposed approachintegrates a combination of requirement and dependency management into the architecture design. It is necessary to get a transparent overview of therequirements andtheir dependencies at an early stage of concept development. To manage the variance of components and their mounting positions, all components to be considered during VAD need to be distinguished and prioritized by their impact on the concept and the variance, within the second step of the method. Their significance is assessed based on suitable criteria. Based on this selection, only a certain number of components is considered during the architecture design. Components not matching these criteria are shifted to be integrated during the package design. During the third step, the creation of manageable architecture alternatives is supported, with the reduced number of components. Afterwards the concept alternatives are evaluated based on the level of similarities and standardization. Consequently, the transparency and efficiency is increased by the three steps ofthe new method for VAD.      «

Following the trends of mass customization, globalization and environmental protection new customer and legal requirements need to be fulfilled in the vehicle product development. The drivers named above often result in a more and more complex product portfolio regarding the variance of components and mounting positions. Hereby passenger cars and commercial vehicles are most affected, offering individualization in large quantity. As a result, the Vehicle Concept Development Process(VCDP) is get...     »